“The Crown” features rap artist Noah Kin and other local youth
The Helsinki City Tourist & Convention Bureau as teamed up with local young people in the Bass Camp youth project to create a new song and video about Helsinki entitled “The Crown”. The video offers a new way to promote Helsinki and give a voice to young people in the city. The song and video feature local rap artist Noah Kin.
Stella Kylä-Liuhala, one of the young people who performing, believes that the proximity to the sea and the powerfully contrasting seasons make Helsinki special: “It’s amazing how you can experience the heat of the summer and the freezing cold winters all in the same city. In wintertime I like to go skating with my friends, for example at Helsinki Icepark in the city centre. The Christmas lights along Aleksanterinkatu are also something to see.”
Stella’s band mate Benjamin Paavilainen also highlights the beauty of the city when it snows. “The best thing about Helsinki is that nature is present even in the city centre.”
The song was performed live for the first time at the Nordic Travel Fair MATKA 2013.
Bass Campus is an association founded in 2010 to support art and cultural education among young people and to inspire and help them realize their own projects in their own neighborhoods.
Virka Gallery
Martti Jämsä: Helsinki – Night and Day
23.1.-28.3.
Photographic artist Martti Jämsä (b. 1959) has wandered the streets of Helsinki shooting the city at night and during the day.
He does not have an actual method of taking pictures: “I don’t know and I don’t even really want to say what draws my attention. Something worn, lived in, there has to be there, though,” says Jämsä. The colourful Polaroid images (2007–2009) taken during day time have been snapped at different places around Helsinki, while most of the black and white night photographs (2010–2012) have been taken near Jämsä’s home in Maunula.
Martti Jämsä is a craftsman who prints and frames his images himself, and in this way he can influence the final result as much as possible. Jämsä is generally regarded as a romantic and as an artist inclined to nostalgia. It is for just these reasons that he likes to emphasise the documentary, reality-based side of his photographs, but he does not deny the “ugly-beautiful” essence of his images.
Virka Gallery, Helsinki City Hall, Sofiankatu 1
Mon-Fri 9-19, Sat-Sun 10-16
Free entry